Energy Explosion

Energy Explosion, 2015 – Acrylic

I became a mama in February 2015. So much love, so much discovery. And… so little time for myself. I eventually learned to navigate the waters of motherhood a *little* better – every day I am adjusting and learning, so I know now that I can find many little ways to express myself and care for myself that do not involve hours of solo time (what is that, anyway?).

The year of 2015 was one of the best years, and also the year of a weird suppression of creativity. Only towards the end of that year I started opening up the channel again and creating more. I fell in love with colorful, kid like things, like puffy paint, fairies, magic, etc.

I was asked to participate in an exhibition in the fall called Exquisite Corpse (Hardy Gallery, Ephraim, Door County, WI). The idea was that various artists would get to create a piece that should fit with other artist’s work on each side of the piece, but the piece itself could be absolutely anything you felt like creating. In my case I had to match two areas of the canvas and I was given those points, from which I created this painting. I call this piece Energy Explosion because that was exactly what it felt like – an explosion of my creative channel that helped unblock it:

The two darker ink areas on each side are continuation points from two other art pieces that had those points as their strong/colored/sculpted areas. I loved the end result. I used ink and acrylic inks, a brush, and a wine cork.

The gallery was amazing, all the artworks were put together as one “exquisite corpse”, one big long work. It was beautiful, different, unique. The sides of my artwork (where the black ink is prominent) were touching another artwork to create the effect of them being one, as flowing into the other pieces. I overheard someone saying how much they loved my painting that night (that it was their favorite, wow!), what a blessing that was. So thank you, stranger, for making me feel great. It meant so much.

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